August 29, 2003
Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology Primer by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby
An interesting article on Evolutionary psychology.
August 27, 2003
Tiresias the hermaphrodite
Tiresias interrupted two mating snakes one evening and was turned into a woman. Years later when the same thing happened again he was turned back into a man. This experience was consulted by Zeus and Hera to end their dispute about who enjoyed sex the most. Tiresias sided with Zeus and was struck blind by Hera.
Vicar of Wakefield
When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can soothe her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover,
And wring his bosom--is to die.
Oliver Goldsmith's Vicar of Wakefield chronicles the life of Primrose.
Mendacity of Presidents
"The Mendacity Index" by Washington Monthly Staff
An interesting article on the lies that presidents tell.
August 25, 2003
August 21, 2003
Rocking on without M$
An interesting article on a company's transition away from M$
August 19, 2003
More Oracle issues
Google Groups: View Thread "What means: Shared memory realm does not exist?"
So I had this problem on a Win XP box (keywords: win32 windows, windows NT, Win2k, windows 2000). All of a sudden my app server refused to work. It would complain that:
== ORA-01034: ORACLE not available
== ORA-27101: shared memory realm does not exist
I tried restarting my machine. I tried restarting the Oracle DB. I tried connecting from Net 8 Assistant to no avail. The magic incantation is:
sqlplus /nolog
connect sys/ORACLE as sysdba
startup
(ORACLE is the default password if you haven't taken the time to change it).
August 15, 2003
Meetings
Meetings don't solve problems. People do -- me
I am tired of people scheduling meetings in the assumption that problems will be solved by the presence of a few people in a room. Meetings are great to make sure everybody agrees on what we have to do. But on the whole people just need to go out there and work on the problem to solve it.
August 14, 2003
Spam Check with a twist
Mailinator allows you to give your email address and not worry about it being used for spam. THe only problem is that the email goes away in a few hours. Maybe if it stuck around for a couple of days it would be better. Its a great idea never the less
Web Design
A must for web designers (like me who have no feel for color). A tool that generates complementary colors for any selection
Accents
A vast chronicle of different accents (while speaking English ofcourse!)
accent archive
August 13, 2003
One life to live
Remember that no man loses any other life than this which he now lives, nor lives any other than this which he now loses.Marcus Aurelius
--Meditations
August 08, 2003
Rendering
When a rendering engine has to render any given object there are two possible ways of doing this. One is to paint all pixels that fall in the middle of the shape. But the problem with this approach is that even though it is fast, on systems with large pixels you end up with a jagged effect. For example when zooming in on pictures you see this problem. This mechanism of painting only the middle of all shapes is called aliasing.
The better mechanism is anti-aliasing. In this method, the redering engine calculates the intersection of every pixel with the shape and coloring them in propotion with how they're present. This way if a pixel is not completely covered by a shape it is still colored but at a lower intensity.
How does this work: The rendering engine calculates the coverage values for all the pixels affected by the shape. These alpha values